292: Winning the Hummingbird War

Okay. I was watching YouTube the other night as one does. Yeah, of course. Who doesn't? Viewing an ad. Oh yeah. I love ads. As one often does while watching YouTube. Hey, did you consider signing back up for YouTube TV? Not really. No. every time i'm on youtube now it's like i have to click in and it's like hey man you should sign up i haven't had youtube tv in 10 years at this point we we never actually signed up for youtube tv we were drafting off of a family member's account let's say wow

just wow stunning revelations here today I don't mind admitting that now that we are unlikely to sign back up anyway I was confronted with this ad on YouTube the other night okay what you got and I just almost fell out of my chair laughing I've got it in front of me. I downloaded it from YouTube so I can go directly from it. Are you ready? Yeah. Security updates for Windows 10 are ending October 14th, 2025. Upgrade now to a Windows 11 Pro PC.

Oh, and stay on the right side of risk. Look, I like risk. My understanding is that a Latin America is a linchpin for the entire Western hemisphere. And also he who controls Australia controls the world. That's right. Those are the two rules of risk. Those are pro tier risk strats.

Could not believe they were straight up putting Windows 10 end of support date information into a YouTube ad like these. I mean, granted, ads are targeted by all sorts of tracking data and stuff. This is not necessarily going in front of every person who watches YouTube, but still, this just felt like it.

This was this cascading series of goofy pieces of text on the screen, like fairly esoteric, like support information about an operating system in an ad. Well, except for it's not. And then there. Well, I know. I know it affects a lot of people, but then. When you click it, did it take you to like HP's buy a new laptop page? It seems like an Intel co-marketed situation. It's like pushing like Intel inside, like kind of Lunar Lake style, you know, like, hey.

Intel laptops are quite good but the thing I really laughed about is that like the upgrade now I thought was a pitch for upgrading to Windows 11 before support ends but no it was hey you should buy a new computer. I think that they probably have data that says, hey, if you've not already upgraded to Windows 11, then you probably are on a machine that can't upgrade to Windows 11. Well.

Anecdotally, though, I think there are a lot of people who have been perfectly eligible for the upgrade for a while who are very much avoiding it. I mean, that's possible. The weird thing about this is I don't get Windows. I don't have Windows. YouTube ad tracking on. My daughter gets really upset when we watch YouTube videos on my account because she's like, dad, the ads you get are absolutely terrible. They're just.

They're just you're all over the place. They're random stuff. There's a lot of weird right wing stuff in there. There's a lot of like, hey, man, the chemtrails are coming for you because the kind of people that don't pay for targeted ads. Just they don't care who sees the ads. Hang on. Is this a Zoomer thing like our targeted ads actually valued? It's like, are you? Well, look, kids, kids today have a weird relationship with ads.

Like is this like a thing where personalized ads are actually to be sought after and like getting the generic everybody ads is like some kind of low class signifier or something? So she would definitely rather have.

targeted ads than the ads that i get that is a hundred percent the case okay she she also like didn't see an ad like ads are really novel for her because she didn't really see an ad until she started watching sports on tv with us infrequently because like she grew up watching movies on our plex and netflix and stuff like that and there's just no ads so like there didn't used to be i mean netflix is a different story now there's ways around that but anyway um

like to her ads are an exciting novelty except for when she's watching live tv during the olympics or basketball game or something and then she's like why why did i see this car ad 12 times in the same window so yeah so like She has a different feeling about ads than we do. That's fair. Anyway, just this ad capped off with stay on the right side of risk. Like just drop a little bit of like light fear mongering in there at the end just to urge people to action.

Well, so I was going to say, I've seen the thumbnail for this ad before. This has come up for me. I have not clicked it. It's been like a banner underneath that other videos. Yeah, I gather that this right side of risk thing is a consolidated marketing campaign that has been launched.

Look, they've spent a lot of they thought Copilot Plus get an AI in your PC was going to sell a lot of PCs last summer. This is going to be the fall of, you know, fuck you. Upgrade or else. We're going to send Steve Ballmer to your house to upgrade your fucking PC. He's coming out of retirement.

Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Brad. Hi, Brad. Hello. Who are you? Oh, I'm Will. Shoot. All right. Look, man, things are a little hazy, but I'm doing better, okay? Okay. All right. You've had a week since last recording. You sound pretty normal. I sound pretty normal. I went to a basketball. I went to see the Valkyries for the first time last night. My wife and her sister have been going to a bunch of games, mainly because they're cheap and it's fun. All right. That sounds fun.

But I got to go see Caitlin Clark. Okay. The Michael Jordan of the WNBA. Yes. Play basketball live last night. That's fun. Now, not to just make everything about COVID, but I know it's top of mind still. Can I ask, what's your masking protocol for a situation such as this? Well, I just got sick, so I let my freak flag fly, baby.

I got I got like two weeks solid of immunity at least. So normally when I go to see a sporting event indoors, like if I go to a baseball game, I probably won't wear a mask because everything's out. outside oh yeah outside this breeze even through like the indoor areas i think it's like basically impossible to catch it outside yeah so um this was less uh this was less um

dense than like when we saw Olivia Rodrigo at Chase Center, the same venue. And I wore a mask the whole time there. I probably would have worn a mask like going into the venue and through the common areas. And then when we sat down in the seats, I probably would have taken it off. Okay.

um because like we were we weren't in the middle like i was in the middle of the road where where their seats are it's like they're on the edge of a row there's nobody around you're like there's no traffic around you it's pretty chill yeah my my gut intuitive sense which could be entirely incorrect but it's typically has been that like the more like the smaller and more enclosed and intimate the space probably the higher chance of spread like like the

like giant cavernous spaces like an arena or even like a supermarket or something I feel like there's probably much the chance is much more randomized like there's there's much more air to move around and so forth Yeah, I feel like the basement of the Nintendo store downtown San Francisco probably is a good place to get COVID. Chase Center so far 100% safe. Okay.

Yeah, so I wear masks on trains and buses and stuff like that when I take public transit. Yeah. Anyway, buses around here are good about having the windows open. But anyway, this is not a virology podcast. No. What is this? It's a tech podcast. Yeah, this week we have we're doing something a little different. We have I don't know. We had a name for this. We didn't write it down. We were talking about it last night. I had called it like a.

tech project wishlist. I don't know if that's quite accurate or not. It's sort of a taking inventory of upcoming projects, things that we have been digging into and like might do soon or maybe a little later down the line, but things we're thinking about and have started researching.

And like that might benefit from talking it like we realize we both have some projects that might benefit from talking it out a little bit like like at least. Well, actually, kind of all three of mine here. I'm sort of like. On the fence of like, is this actually worth investing time and or money into? Is this like we need to flip our chairs around backwards and wrap? Yep. Like we need to Riker it. It's time for some real talk here. Yeah. It's time for some real talk about travel internet.

Wait, isn't Real Talk Bill Maher's show? Oh, I don't know. Probably. Yeah, we don't want to do that. But anyway, Reeler Talk with Brad and Will. That's what this one's going to be.

You want to kick it off? Yeah, sure. Honestly, the whole reason I thought of this episode topic was coming out of that Summer Game Fest trip. Yeah. During which I started thinking pretty seriously to myself, it might be time to get a travel router. You know, I'm going to tell you I had a travel router. Did you? For a long time. So, OK, this is this is why I like this episode idea is because.

I can draw on your experience. We can talk through use cases here and like try to figure out like, hey, is this actually worth pursuing? So the thing for me, I stopped carrying it. It was really important for me in the. time period when you still had a working ethernet port in a hotel room and I was traveling a lot, but you didn't, but like hotel wifi was bad.

And I typically would have a device or two that I needed to connect with Wi-Fi and I couldn't connect with Ethernet. OK, so the Ethernet was going to be Ethernet port availability in hotel rooms was going to be the sort of. eventual crux of this discussion. But now that you've mentioned it, I'm just going to say it up top. The hotel room I was in did not have an Ethernet port. No, they hardly ever do anymore, which is unfortunate because, yeah, like the ideal use case for one of these is.

plug it into the hard line in the room and then put all your Wi-Fi devices on your router. But also, OK, so we did use them a lot of tested when we were doing like production on trips like. We had two kinds of kinds of trips attested. One was like we would go on a road trip and we'd shoot a bunch of video and then we'd bring the video back home and we'd edit it. And like there wasn't like the cataloging cataloging cards at the end of the night was basically.

We'd go eat dinner, and then we'd all go back to our rooms and do our stuff for the next day. And Joey's thing for the next day would be grabbing footage off of the thing and putting it on a couple of hard drives so that in case one conked out, we didn't lose anything, right?

On the other kind of trips, the ones like when we go to CES or E3 or something, we'd shoot a bunch of video and then we'd also post it there. Having the travel router was incredibly useful because it made it much easier for like. computer to computer transfers across the network rather than using an external drive or something like that yeah i mean you guys had real production needs like that 100 makes uh makes sense and proves its worth like in my case i mean

I used to do a ton of work in hotel rooms 15 to 20 years ago. Like, yeah, like had needs like that. But those days are pretty much over. Like at Summer Game Fest, this was this was just like personal use, really. OK. There are two angles for me here. There's the security angle, which is like maybe not as pressing as it seems, because I think most traffic, especially web traffic, but pretty much anything that your devices are doing.

is individually encrypted already. HTTPS and things like that exist. Your DNS traffic maybe is not encrypted, to be fair, if you're worried about somebody sniffing that on a public Wi-Fi or something. Well, but it'd be easy to put wire, like you have WireGuard on your phone probably already in most of your devices. I have been having some issues. The phone's been fine. My laptop, I did the trial last month. And so I had a lot of like lunch hours in the courthouse.

uh, on their wifi and then immediately went into this hotel thing. In both cases, I was having a lot of issues VPNing on my laptop and I'm not a hundred percent sure why, like it was just causing like bad instability on the connection. i wonder if you have a i wonder if you have bum version you just need to update or something

I don't think WireGuard auto updates, at least for me. It should all be up to date. It's like I got it out of the App Store on macOS, so it should be updating itself. But something I actually came to realize talking to some people on the network channel is that a lot of enterprise... networking wi-fi stuff these days is doing all kinds of profiling of client devices to detect what they consider to be threats oh of course and so like that like there's and and it's not like

As I understand it, it's not like your laptop advertises to whatever it's connecting to. Hey, I'm a MacBook or hey, I'm a Mac OS client. It's like they are looking at a bunch of attributes of how the device is connecting to the network and using.

The network makes sense. Yeah. Sending, sending traffic, like what, what ports are in use, stuff like that. Like whether you're all going to one endpoint or you're going to a bunch of different endpoints, stuff like that. Like they're like, like Mac address profiling, like all kinds of stuff basically to determine. And so like they actually.

Again, we have a fair number of network professionals on the Discord, and I actually kind of got the sense that they were saying, hey, they might consider laptops to be a threat in a way that iPhones are not, and that might be why VPN is working fine on your phone and not...

on your laptop, on the same SSID. Oh, that's weird. Uh, anyway, so there's that there's the, there's like the security angle, but actually it's the convenience angle was the bigger one for me. Like just not having to, like, it's a pain, like, okay, so. Going to a hotel, going to some venue or something, connecting to the Wi-Fi kind of sucks. There's always some sort of captive portal nonsense you have to click through. It's not great.

The thing I've found over the last few years is that my 5G phone hotspot is invariably better than the Wi-Fi in the hotel. Yeah, the Wi-Fi was not good in this hotel at all. So like that might have actually been a dead end to even have a travel router in this case. I think, yeah, like I can't which brand it is. Is it Hilton? I think Hilton's have maybe the worst Wi-Fi as a brand that I've ever seen.

Or whatever group owns Sheraton is who has terrible Wi-Fi. I've gone to a bunch of their hotels. It's always bad. Like, I wrote a note one time. It was so bad because they charged me for it. And I was like, this is unusable.

I had better internet than this when I lived in Tennessee and had ISDN. You guys suck. You know, it would be a fun episode, which I doubt we could put together because I doubt they would talk about it. But if we could just sort of anonymously get like the IT from six or eight random corporate hotels.

corporately owned hotels to talk about, like, I would just love to know, like, Hey, what is the connection that is supplying internet to your entire hotel? Is it, is it one DSL line being split across the whole building? Like, what are you doing at this point? I that's what he often feels like. Yeah, I would not be surprised if it's one DSL line. In some cases, I we had somebody in. I can't remember if it was tested or if it was in.

the tech pod days, but we had somebody who worked at a big hotel chain right in when I complained about this last time. And it was, it was interesting. Well, actually, you know, the Q&A is next week. So if you work in hotel IT or know people who do, I would love to hear some details. Yeah, send it in.

Let's get to the juice. But you're 100 percent right. It's actually it was the convenience factor more than the security one that really started making me think about this, because, you know, I don't know about you, but I kind of take everything that I might use with me. Laptop. Really? I take nothing. What? I often travel with just a phone. Wow. My standard kit is laptop, iPad, MacBook, Switch.

of course the watch because that's a wearable yeah yeah typically that's it but that's still that's still five devices that could connect to wi-fi so getting getting a i i would I think I would rather make the trade off of carrying one little extra box because these things are quite small at this point. I would rather carry the one extra box that I have already configured all those devices to connect to once. That's true. And then just plug that thing in or get that thing on the local Wi-Fi.

Instead of getting each of those devices on the Wi-Fi, really, as with everything, this all comes back to Fortnite. Because that Death Star event, that one-day Death Star event happened while I was down there. Did you get to see it? No, I did not. I had my Switch 1 with me. I mean, I was kind of busy. I had appointments. I could have tried to cram it in in half an hour on Saturday morning before I went off to do meetings.

Having to get that switch online with the hotel's weird captive portal that makes you enter your room number and all that stuff. I was just like, I don't feel like dealing with this. I'm just not going to. But like if you. If you had all your devices on Wi-Fi that you controlled and you just had to plug in that one box like that, actually, that's got a lot of appeal to me. And I think I would actually be happy to add one extra little doohickey to carry with me in exchange. Well, so.

Maybe you just need a hotspot. Yeah. You could put the router together, put it in a hotspot, and hook it up to a big USB battery. And be like 90% of the way to like not ever having to connect to the thing, but you'll have to pay more. You'll have to pay another connection fee. Oh yeah. That's.

10 bucks a month or whatever. Yeah, I've done a little bit of preliminary research looking around like there are DIY options here. But for once, I don't think that's what I would want to deal with. Like you could you could take a Raspberry Pi and plug like a. Yeah, that seems really. Not good. Janky in a bad way. The thing I've seen the most recommendations for is this company GL Inet. Okay.

uh that makes it's it's styled gl.inet is if you want to google it um it's a terrible yeah it's not okay that's not great it's not great and i cannot endorse this company this is just like i was just googling like best travel routers and this was coming up a lot in various threads i was finding

But they're pretty cheap. The little boxes this company sells are like, they range from like $40 to I think their most expensive Wi-Fi 7 one is like $140. They've got little fold-down antennas that look kind of cool. They've got like a couple of Ethernet ports on them. Crucially for me, they run open WRT. Like it's not, it's not some stock firmware. I think it, I think it's generic open WRT. I don't think it's modified by them, although I could be wrong, but like they advertise.

they advertise like speeds for wire guard and open VPN right there on their product pages. So it's like techie enough for me to, you know, it's like, Oh, this one gets 300 megabits per second throughput over wire guard and 150 open VPN, like stuff like that. Can you, can you put, uh,

cellular, can you like hook a USB cellular motor up to these things and just be good to go? I would assume so. That sounds pretty good to me. I would assume so. Like their, their, their like high end wifi six model is like 80 bucks. So it's actually like a pretty low investment to try out.

The newer ones are USB-C powered, so I assume you could run them off of your MacBook. That sounds pretty good. Yeah, you should be running off the MacBook. I would think so. 30 watts? I didn't look up the specs on it.

It can't be high wattage. It really can't use that much power. Although, I think it's also time, if I get a travel router, I think it's also time to get one of those multi-port gallium nitride USB-C chargers. I'm like two years overdue to get one of those things. So when those were on sale, so for folks who don't know, these are gallium nitride. They're just really, really small high power USB-C chargers.

Um, like the size of an old iPhone plug basically, but it'll charge your laptop or, or maybe closer to laptop brick size. If you get one of the ones that has like four ports on it, which, which is what I would do because I already roll with my MacBook charger when I travel, which is the same size with one port on it.

Which just feels like it feels like a huge waste of space. You know, like if I could get a brick that's roughly the same size that I can plug three to four devices into at the same time, like that's that's the way. Well, it's interesting. So I wouldn't anchor.

put those on sale the first time i got some of the i think they're 45 watt max um dual like there's one 45 watt port or 160 watt port and 130 watt port and i use those all the time when I travel because they're like those are like the size of an of an iPhone like a little bit bigger than an old iPhone charger and and like basically just every when we go on a trip I don't I guess you don't know this because you have kids but like

One of the things that I always pack on trips is all the charging apparatus. Okay. So I have a little like, like Patreon sent us a couple of dop kits a few years ago. And all of the chargers live in those for the whole family. So there's like one of those gallium nitride chargers for each person for phones and tablets. Oh, wow. And.

Uh, then, then that's, then if somebody needs like a watch charger or something like that, then we have, they get one more, but yeah, it's really, really handy. I highly recommend those. Sure. Also crucially, uh, the little tiny desk area in this room only had one power outlet. So like, yeah.

That went to my MacBook charger, which, again, has one port on it. Like I like having being able to plug everything straight into the wall would be really nice there, including the travel router. Nothing I like more than a big power plug just right away.

Beside the bed on the floor with like 12 wires snaking out of it. Yeah. I might try one of those things. I don't know. Maybe I'll reach out to that company or just buy one. I'm not sure. There are other options. Like I looked around like micro tick, which is pretty high end network kind of prosumer. Yeah, they make a bunch of home DIY routers on OpenSense and stuff like that. Their stuff all runs their own software, actually. Oh, that's right.

Yeah. We have people who are advocate for that. Yeah. Some, some micro tick fans. There's, there's also a firewall, which I don't have much experience with at all, but I think people like their stuff too. Like both of those are more expensive just from the little bit. I looked around at there. Yeah.

Tiny router travel options. Those are definitely substantially more expensive, but I might continue looking into this. I don't do a lot of business travel anymore. Like I'm not in hotels a ton, but like when I am, it would really be nice to just have this in place and just have all my stuff work.

It would be nice to just have pie hole automatically wherever you are. Absolutely. Like that, like all of my devices would be connected to a thing that's like I would in my case, I would just set this up to permanently connect to the WireGuard instance in my house and then all my. Devices would just be going through my or blocky rather than piehole at this point. But like, yeah. Yeah. Seems like a fun thing to dabble with, if nothing else.

So I we talked about DIY bird cameras a few years ago or just bird cameras a few years ago rather. And we talked about a few weeks ago. Really? Yeah. The duck can't remember the somebody else's bird camera. Yeah. The duck camera came up on extensively on the last Q&A. So I'm thinking about specifically feeder cameras. We have we we get.

five different species of hummingbirds, at least here, because we're on the migration path throughout the year. There's two or three that live here all the time, or at least big chunks of the year. And then there's a few more that come through. And as a result, we get hummingbird wars at our hummingbird feeder we have two we have two or three feeders depending on like you know how clean stuff is and whether we need to replace one or what

But the hummingbirds come to the feeders and some of them light. Some of them sit down on like a little peg and sit there, which like most of the hummingbirds I grew up with on the East Coast just don't do that. They're always hoverers. I don't think I've ever seen a hummingbird perch before. Yeah. yeah so they'll like the anna's will just sit there and just like just go ham on the feeder for like five minutes um the uh the we get rufuses we get black chinned

We get we get a couple others and. Like they're complete assholes to each other. Of course, enormous. So they come up and they're like, you know, because hummingbird hummingbird chirps are really, really high pitched. You just hear them like it's almost sounds like clicks sometimes and with like little tiny whistles and they scream at each other and they hover around each other and they like jab at each other with their beaks.

and then one flies off the other one sits on the feeder so uh the the the problem is there's a couple of commercial hummingbird feeder products but none of them seem particularly good or the ones that are good are like $500 and I'm not spending that on a hummingbird camera. How do they build those? Like, I mean, do they literally call them hummingbird cameras? Are they that sort of fit for purpose?

they're literally a camera integrated with like a hummingbird feeder. And so that's the other problem. Yes. Okay. Yes. Is hummingbird feeders have a finite lifespan. If you don't want to accidentally kill the hummingbirds, um, because it, well, the plastic bits. Because they're exposed to sugar water, basically, they tend to grow mold and bacteria. Oh, of course. So you can clean them, but exposure to time and porosity of the plastic and all that stuff.

Eventually, you get to a place where you're risking killing the hummingbirds by giving them bacteria and mold poisoning in their feeders. That's not good. Are there no metal? Are there no higher-end metal? Well, the metal one's rust, so that's the other. Right. Stainless steel ones. I mean, I'm not. I mean, maybe. But like, I guess my point is.

The bird camera ones are all attached to crappy plastic feeders that look like they're not going to like I can look at the feeder and be like, oh, yeah, this one's going to be a problem to keep clean. Yeah. And I don't want to kill the hummingbirds. So. So what I want to do is get a good hummingbird feeder and use a good camera on it. Now, the problem is there's a couple of problems, actually. Optics are a little bit of a challenge.

Because most of the kind of like security cameras, stuff that you would use for this, that's going to include software that will automatically trigger the ability to do recordings and stuff like that isn't. probably going to be great for the range at which the birds will be at which is probably less like foot four inches maybe yeah um now you can fix that with like stick on optics there's a there's a

thanks to phone cameras, there's a large market of, Hey, we can get a fisheye lens. It'll tap out that you can glue on over your, your security camera lens. I, the problem is. A lot of the action doesn't happen on the feeding part of the feeder. So you need kind of a wider camera that's a little bit further away. You want to get all that dog fighting.

Yeah. I want, I want the dog. I want the war. I want the hummingbird war. And also I want the sound too. And I want a pretty good, I want pretty good frame rate. And maybe the ability to do higher frame rate. Okay. That was exactly where I was just dying to jump in and be like, okay, can we do high speed here? So we can see some slow-mo homing bird fighting. Yeah. Like two 40 Hertz.

High speed with hummingbirds looks awesome because you can see their wings move. Right. Right. And I just I am I've dug into it a lot. There's a lot of like birdhouse. Hey, you can watch the birds nest projects. There's a lot of stuff like that. I have not found anything that is remotely suitable for hummingbirds. There's a lot of like.

Hey, you can repurpose a security camera and then glue on a wide angle lens. And like, that is not going to do the thing that I want mostly because a, the security cameras rarely have sound and be. the frame rates and the camera, like the cameras just aren't very good on the most security cameras. So that's kind of where I'm at. There's one.

there's a reddit thread i think this person basically was like hey i want to get a home kit hummingbird feeder camera and um then like the thread just went nowhere You can be the pioneer in this space. You can blaze the trail. You can make the Reddit thread or the blog. Well, I guess in your case, the newsletter. I'd probably do a newsletter for this one, yeah. That spells out the way to go.

Um, but yeah, so if people have, if people have, I would love feedback on like, honestly, the big challenge I've found is finding a good high speed camera that'll work in an outdoor situation. Um, and, and ideally, like, ideally I don't want to capture 24 hours loops of 240 Hertz, 10 AP video. Yeah, that's a lot.

Yeah, it would be a lot. So what I want is motion triggered. And yeah, I'd be curious if people have feedback on that. I wonder if you're going to find, I mean, all the parameters you're looking for, high speed, like the optics situation. I wonder if you're going to find that in combination with.

the typical IP camera suite of connectivity? I don't think so. That's the other thing is because you're going to want a camera that, we've talked about this before, that can stream video over a network, over a common video protocol that you can intercept with something and record.

So, so the, the place that I went down the furthest, the hole that I went down the furthest was, um, uh, uh, old phone cams because the phone cameras, like an, like an old pixel phone camera specifically.

You know, an Android phone, I can tap into the software. It has the high speed. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. And then there's like, there's all, like you said, there's all those aftermarket optics that literally are designed to fit onto that phone. Yeah. And you can buy external enclosures for those.

And then I could probably power it with either a PoE dongle or a little solar panel. That sounds like a pretty solid option. I bet also I bet the secondhand like two to three generation old pixel market is pretty robust. yeah because like like a pixel phone from two years ago would be fine for this right um

So anyway, that, that's that, that I just, I, I, I literally looked at it for iPhone. I didn't look at it for Android phone. I was talking about, I was like, Oh, I should look up phones for this. Cause this might be the answer. Yeah. That sounds cool. Um, but anyway, yeah. Sorry.

Hummingbird camera. Yeah. All right. My next thing. Okay. This I am going to do this weekend because I have personal travel coming up next month and I want this in place by then. All right. I'm going to jailbreak my Kindle. Why? I'll tell you why. So I started thinking about this earlier this year. I thought you had done this back when Amazon pulled their DMR and DRM jack move earlier this year.

which was, I just decrypted all of my books. Yeah. So I ended up doing that too. What, what Amazon did earlier this year was close off one of the. options or maybe the only option at that point for getting your purchase amazon books off of your kindle in a drm free way yeah so there's other ways to do it now they're more involved and i can't understand i you know

The Internet always finds a way, right? Like anytime somebody is like, hey, it's your last chance to do this thing before this corporation clamps down on your freedom to do so. And then two weeks later, it's like, hey, we found a new way. Well, yeah, this one was like this way is really dead simple. And it's like.

you know, just download the books and hit a couple of buttons and then all of your stuff is done. Right. Yeah. But yeah. So, so I ended up doing that too. I got all of the books that I own on whatever Amazon calls its Kindle store, digital library, the Kindle store. Yeah. But from that point, I started thinking, like, maybe I should go a little further with this device. And so I've been looking into Kindle jailbreaking and modding and so forth.

The main reason I want to do it is a software called CoReader. What does CoReader do? It is literally just a different book reading piece of software. It replaces the built-in Amazon interface for reading books. I will say right now, before I go any further here, if I had done more research that my Kindle is, it's an 11th gen paperwhite. So I've had it for two years. I got them at the same time. We've had it for three years. Maybe it was three years ago now.

If I had done more research at the time, I kind of just went into that thinking, I mean, maybe this was like 10-year-old outdated thinking that like the Kindle was still just the thing to get in the e-reader space.

Like I've since come to learn that like a lot of people really like things like Kobo's better or there's books, BOOX. There are other options that are more open and less like kind of corporately controlled than the Kindle these days. Yeah. And I think the books when you can even put a Kindle app on, right?

Probably. I wouldn't be surprised. I don't know that for sure. But the point is, some of those other third-party e-readers can install CoReader on their own without jailbreaking, without modification. What's the benefit of CoReader?

It's basically just better reading software. It adds a lot more options than the built-in Kindle one does, or in some cases, enables options that are only available on the much higher-end Kindles. Like, I forget, what are the... Is it Voyager? Oasis and all those. Oasis, yeah. It's the much, much more... Like, for example, you can do...

landscape mode on any kindle with co-reader and and you can do two column landscape mode oh fancy um like way more font options way more way more options for just customizing the reading experience Probably the bigger thing, though, actually, than the reading experience is you can just drag and drop files onto the Kindle over USB and they just show up in the library. That seems nice. No more dealing with Amazon's like send to Kindle web interface that seems to fail half the time.

Wait, really? Or using that bespoke email address they give you like, hey, email documents. Like I've gotten I've gotten books from publishers before, like books that are not out yet for like like when we had Jason Schreier on. The Next Lander podcast last fall, I ended up missing that because of the hurricane, but he wrote a book about Blizzard that I read, and his publisher sent us advanced e-book copies.

It took me, I don't know how long and how many tries to get that copy of the book they sent us to show up on my Kindle. Really? Like going through, I tried the email address and the send to Kindle web interface. And like, I just, it just kept failing over and over. Oh, see, I use the syndicated web interface all the time and it's worked pretty consistently for me. I've had spotty.

spotty luck with their tools for that stuff um i mean it's definitely not a focus and they definitely don't make like the send to kindle interface easy to find yes because they want you to just buy the thing from the store well and also and this is not apparent to the user but under the hood they are converting whatever DPUB or PDF, whatever format you send through that interface to whatever they're encrypted.

custom amazon format is that's another example or another benefit of co-reader is that it supports like every file format you can think of so oh that's nice if you've got a pdf or an epub or whatever it is just drag it on there It also syncs with caliber. I have come to realize in watching some YouTube. Oh, did you know? Yeah, I learned. I look, I got a lot of messages. I see. Okay. The, the book management software formerly known as Calibre.

Yeah, it's caliber caliber because the guy's British. But caliber will sync books over Wi-Fi to to co-reader as well. That's nice. Yes. So like there are a lot of more easy options for getting more different types and formats of books onto the thing.

I'll link the YouTube video that I watched about the jailbreak and Coreader and stuff like that in here because he does a nice video tutorial of what options Coreader enables. It just looks like a better experience. Also, this is anecdotal, but watching him navigate that software. I'd swear it seems faster and more responsive than the built-in Amazon interface. Well, so it's, it's funny cause I buy, I buy, like I often will buy a book collection from humble. If there's a lot of, um,

If they, if they have a lot of things that I'm interested in and that, uh, that fulfills through Kobo, I think. Okay. Um, so like there's always a. Hey, I have to decrypt this using caliber and then I have to email them to myself or use the upload thing to get into the Kindle library. Right. It seems like it'd be nice to just move in between. But the other thing is I've been having trouble with e-readers as I've gotten older.

like e-ink yeah kidding i um i don't know what it is about my eyes now but i pick up the depth on the bubbles in the in the fonts so that like The serifs sometimes feel like they're closer to the surface of the screen than the other parts of the ligatures of the typeface. And it's really hard to read, but only sometimes. So when I set the e-reader to do a complete page refresh every time instead of just changing the, like doing the small number of pixels, it seems fine.

But then the battery life goes to hell in them and it's like much less valuable as an option. Interesting. I do wonder about battery life with the stuff. I do wonder if you're going to see a hit. Yeah, that's my fear is that, you know, Amazon is probably optimizing for that in a way that homebrew is not.

necessarily, but, um, you got that can charger, just plug it in a little more. So, so the thing that surprised me the most about the jailbreak, uh, I'll, I'll link this in the show notes, but Kindle modding.org is a really nice clean wiki that very clearly lays out here is every. historical model of Kindle and what process is for jailbreaking that particular model, which firmware version it needs to be on.

I think it's only the very newest firmware right now that can't be jailbroken, but it seems like there's a leapfrog thing of, you know, they put out a new firmware and then some weeks or months later, they figure out how to jailbreak that one. So you do have to pay attention to that.

I haven't gone through the whole process yet, but it does seem it seems both really easy, but also a bit detail oriented in ways that you need to be aware of. Like the jailbreaking process is literally just downloading some files and copying them to the Kindle.

over USB and then rebooting the Kindle. Like that's basically it. But you do need to do things in a certain order to make sure that a future over the air update doesn't blow away the jailbreak. That makes sense. So there's a little bit of fiddliness there, but it seems quite easy if you follow the wiki steps.

The big one for me, and this would have been a deal breaker if this were not the case, but you can just factory reset the Kindle and completely remove all of the jailbreak. Yeah, it's not like they banned people for jailbreaking or anything like that. Right. So you can. I guess they could. Yeah, they could.

They definitely could. But it is reversible as of now. But like I said, the thing that really surprised me is that you're still running the Amazon OS once this is jailbroken. I kind of assumed this was some whole OS replacement, like it was running Linux or something after jailbreak. Yeah.

but it is absolutely like you can still get to the Amazon reader, the Amazon library, like all the built-in factory stuff is there. It's just, you have an extra launcher that lets you launch stuff like co-reader. Yeah, it's interesting. I might actually mess around with this. Sounds fun. Yeah, I'll link the stuff in the show notes. It seems pretty easy. There's a bunch of other stuff you can do with the jailbreak that I am almost certainly not going to do. There is a Game Boy emulator.

That seems low value. Uh, there is an Alpine Linux distribution you can install. No, no, don't need that. Uh, is it, can you play snake? Uh, you can play way more than snake. I mean, I saw in this video, he's playing Tetris. He's playing Pokemon. I can't imagine playing Tetris on an E-ink screen. It's going to be great. Yeah, I'm not so sure. There might be cases where having a full Linux distribution available on there could come in handy.

So that's some real Neal Stephenson business. I am not going to do that. Here's something I might actually do. There is a home assistant app for this, or there's a way to hook into your home assistant. Now that. Seems like a good way to upcycle an old Kindle. Totally. In fact, I actually I believe it's the same video I was watching. This guy took a very old Kindle and 3D printed.

a wall for it yeah and just turned it into a permanent like installed in the house like control panel for home assistant that sounds pretty good running on an e-ink screen so like that actually is a super cool idea but so that That, hey, let's have a big e-ink screen that controls your home assistant install is one of the things that I've looked at those books tablets for in the past because they run Google Play. Oh, okay. And they also make kind of big ones.

Like they make a 10 inch, they make a 10 inch screen. Is there any danger with the ink of Vernon? I mean, I don't think so. Okay. I don't know why there would be. I mean, it's designed for displaying the same image for quite a long time. Yeah. I guess it's probably resilient to that. I hope. Well, yeah. And like it works by moving particles through fluid. So like if it stops working, it'll like.

It's because either the charge thing on the bottom that makes the particles go away or come closer or the fluid has a problem. Sure. Yeah, sure. In my case, like I frequently am lying in bed at night without any other devices that can control home assistant nearby.

And all the lights in the bedroom are on smart plugs. So if I forget to, if the timer is not convenient on those lamps or I forget to have a phone near me or something, it's a real pain to turn the lights off. So having the Kindle is frequently the only thing I have in bed. You just say, hey, Siri, turn off the lights. Might surprise you to hear I have disabled all of the. It doesn't surprise me at all. Voice activated. Hey, Siri functionality. Not one bit. Not one bit.

Anyway, this all seems quite easy to do and just gives you a bunch more flexibility for how you use your Kindle, and I'm pretty excited about it, I think.

Well, so it's funny, the, the, the using the ink screen, this is when I, this is the thing I forgot that I couldn't remember when we were talking about this last night, the home. I have walked down the hole and come back multiple times now on building one of those home kind of console panels. It's like a home organizer. It's like a shared calendar for the home that's on a big screen. And like. I don't exactly know why I haven't done it, because it would be really useful.

I mean, some of our household doesn't really like using electronic calendars. They like using paper because, you know, 20th century. They're Luddites. I mean, no, I get it. I'm joking. Luddites are good, Brad. It turns out. Remember, you have to remember that. But but yeah, no. There's just too much complexity in the space and I don't know what I want and I don't really want to pay for something. And I have a couple of big old screens that should do this. Like I have this old.

uh electronic objects electric objects frame from like i don't know i bought it as a kickstarter 10 years ago how big is it uh pretty big it's like 19 inches i think okay that's pretty good i mean i was gonna ask like what is what is what is the common biggest size of touchscreen you can get these days although that's 10 years ago i'm sure they're bigger now well so that's the thing a lot of these aren't even touchscreens these are just displays so they're just for

Like, hey, here's what's going on with everybody today. Here's everybody's calendars for the day. Here's the weather. Here's what here's the scratch board that you can post to with your phone, stuff like that. And like, it just doesn't seem that useful. for the amount of effort that's going to go into setting it up and keeping it maintained so you know i guess we're going to keep using the calendars with the dry erase markers i don't know

Have you ever thought about doing a smart mirror? If it's not going to be touched to begin with, smart mirrors look so cool. I mean, when we replaced our... bathroom mirror cabinet thing i specifically bought one with the doors that are thick enough that i could cut out take the mirror off cut out a piece of it and then glue the mirror back on and um i

I don't think I want electricity in my bathroom cabinet. I don't think I would want it in the bathroom. Generally, I think I think like something in the hallway, like in a common area out in the house is probably the ideal place for a smart mirror.

Yeah. But you need, you have to carve out wall behind it in that case then. Yeah. Or just have a very thick device hanging on the wall. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe the thing to do is like the other thing I keep looking at are those little projectors. Like the, the.

The cheap solid state projectors have gotten like really inexpensive and really good lately. And I feel like maybe that's the place for that kind of ambient stuff is you just blast it on the kitchen counter or something like it's a hotel room now. Some kind of some kind of like permanent heads up display, like activity display sort of thing like you're talking about feels it feels like the time has come in a world that feels increasingly cyber. You know what I mean? Like, yeah.

In a world where like a lot of the science fiction elements of nineties action movies feel like they are just sort of popping off left and right these days. Well, yeah. And like things like present sensors are really good now. Like you can, you can tell where people are in the room so you could, you could have it.

come up with the person who's looking at its calendar based on the amount of water in their person and stuff like anyway i don't know it's it's i i don't really want to dig into this the thing i really want to talk about is the twitch

uh 1440p streaming which i got access to a couple of days ago right yeah so we we signed up for that on next lander as well i am curious to hear have you used it yet i so I realized after I signed up for it that I don't actually have a way to use it because the capture card that grabs footage from my gaming PC is only good for 4K 30. It's a Blackmagic, so it does.

It does 1080p60 or 4K30 and it doesn't do anything in between because it's black magic and they only do real resolutions, not bullshit gaming resolutions. Right. Also, you're capturing even PC footage you're capturing over an actual video connection, right? I'm capturing over a literal. yeah hgmi connection outputting from one machine to another you can't exactly you can't do game capture at any resolution i mean i could but my stuff is like

I set up for two PC rig years ago and I haven't changed back to a single PC just because it's nice to not have the overhead. You could send you could you could do what I do and capture game capture. and compress the video at high quality on your gaming PC and send it over the network to your stream. Doesn't that add a bunch of latency? It does. Like, this would be a temporary solution, but if you just want to, like, try it out without waiting for a new dongle or something.

Well, so I have a capture card in my main PC that I use for console games that would work. Okay. That does it. It's an Avermedia 4K Ultra or whatever. It does 1440p, 240 or something ridiculous. I don't know if I want to pull that card because I do actually use the capture card to play PlayStation and Switch 2 games now sometimes. The thing I really want to do...

is I want to dig into external capture boxes. They use USB three or four, because then I could turn this streaming box from a big giant tower into an ITX. board itx machine that's just like a fairly lightweight itx machine and um you know an external capture card sure and i don't know anybody who

Like my perception of the external capture cards is always that they're toys. That's always been my feeling as well, but I have absolutely nothing to back that up. Like I know people who use them and seem to have perfectly good luck with them. Well, yeah, I mean, you get USB 3.2 or whatever, and you're getting the same amount of bandwidth that I'm getting from my buy two slot on my internal card. Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess there are the typical concerns with...

high-end USB stuff, you know, worrying about bus contention or whatever, you know, some USB controllers are less quality than others, depending on your motherboard and what they put on there. Yeah. Like, USB. USB for high-end, low-latency, real-time stuff like video and audio is not always super reliable. It seems like they sell them, though, so they probably work. I don't know.

Maybe I'll buy one someplace I can return it and let you know how it goes. I've been using a USB capture dongle for this camera for five years and that's worked just fine. I wonder if I can just get one of those. Probably. yeah i wonder if it supports weird resolutions i don't know do you know anything about the parameters of twitch's 1440p streaming i'm looking at their help page for this beta and i specifically i want to know what the

what their ingest bandwidth limit is. If they've, I hope to God raised it above the six megabit caps that is on current 1080p streams and also what codecs they're supporting. And I can't find that. Okay. So first off. They've upped the limit on the 1080p streams to you can do more now. Really? But only if you do the multi encode locally. Oh, is that still only in that beta version of OBS? Yeah, I think, no, it's in mainline OBS now because I do it.

It is, but you still have to use OBS, right? You have to use OBS. I think you can do it. I think you can do it with other stuff now, too. I'm going to have to look into that. I mean, I don't do a lot of streaming myself. Vinny handles most of the streaming lately because I haven't been doing a lot of solo streaming, but I use FFMPEG.

twitch so i wonder if i've been worried for a while that they're not going to make it easy to do stuff like the multi-encode with that the multi so the multi-encode is really nice because it gives it gives um basically all of the resolutions are streamed locally yeah so that means there's no like if you have people that watch on phones or or tvs they'll often lag even like three or four seconds behind the rest of the stream

Because of the transcoding. Because of the transcoding. And that's if your channel even has transcoding available to begin with. Yeah, and you have to be a partner to get access to guaranteed transcoding. Yeah, I guess we should step back a little bit. What we're talking about here is having the streamer do all the different encode qualities to send out to various clients rather than Twitch used to do all of that on their end. So like really, this is just Twitch offload.

the horsepower and electricity to the end user that they used to cover themselves. But that's still preferable, especially like, you know, modern graphics cards and CPUs with Quicksync and stuff like that can do multiple encodes just fine.

at pretty low power if you're using hardware acceleration so it's not a huge deal but but it is going to take some more doing on the software end to get the multi-code working for people so it looks like it's 20 megabits and you have to do the multi-stream okay So that means it's OBS 31 or newer. Yeah, I see. I see on the on their help page here for this.

Beta, it looks like you're doing minimum 14 megabit uploads. So that's actually, that's pretty damn generous. That's over double what the old cap was. But I think 14 is only for the main 1440p stream and everything else comes downstream from that. That does make sense. But I still don't see any mention of what codec is being used here. It's 8264 still. Wait, what? I believe. What?

I can't, what the fuck are we doing? Um, I don't cause it's, it's works on two 20, 2000 series or newer, which I think is, is, uh, yeah. is your H.264. I don't think AV1 is on yet. Yeah, I don't see anything. I do see mention of HEVC on this page, but I'm not sure that they're actually letting you use it. I do not think that there, I mean, you have to use their presets. You can't set up the stream manually. I see. Okay. So it's, I don't know if you can tell. So yeah, it's great. All right.

I'm I'm maybe I'll do a stream and just not stream from the second PC and try it out and then decide if I want to spend 200 bucks on another capture card. Yeah. Yeah, we are set up for that year. So I hope that we get into that beta sometime soon so we can try it out.

Like it feels about two years overdue now for Twitch to have done some major upgrade to the available streaming quality. Does that mean I'm going to have to upgrade my feed out to Vinny? Yeah, but that's just an internal configuration change in OBS. That's true. I could send him 4K right now if you wanted. That's right. I might actually send him 4K right now when I think about it. Oh, yikes. Let me see. Whoa.

I just let's let's look at my my live OBS settings checking here. You've disabled your virtual camera. I just see your OBS logo now. I know I had to go. I had to go look. It looks like. I'm using the old version of NVENC too to send to him. Oh, that's bad. It looks like I am sending HEVC to you guys. Yeah, I think that's what I had you set up. In fact, that's the best he can ingest.

Yeah, I'm only doing 1080p. vMix does not have support for AV1 or other newer codecs. But HEVC is fine for that. But for people who don't know, we send video over the network. Yeah. To Vinny who ingests it into V-Mix. Anyway. It's funny. It seems like the OBS handover has gotten to the point that it seems like it's the clear.

Like the V mix and the commercial products have a handful of things that they still do really, really well. Yeah. But for the most part, OBS seems like, um, like the place to like, if you're learning a new thing now, OBS seems like the thing to learn. Yeah, it's both the widely available free option and also probably the most well-supported in terms of staying up to date with new features and codecs. The one thing vMix has that I really... I mean, it does a lot of stuff that...

It's more of like a commercial switching software. You know, it looks more like an actual TV. You could hook a control surface up to it. Right. Compared to OBS. But the one thing that it has that I really wish OBS had. or at least that I had a better option for, was dealing with like a multi-caller situation, kind of like your typical remote podcast situation. Your remote, you know, three to four talking heads all sending audio separately.

Like, I know there are some external, like, web-based tools. There's, like, there's what used to be called OBS Ninja. I forget what they have rebranded to. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, it's OBS Samurai now, I think. Oh, it's VDO.Ninja now. OK, if you go to video dot ninja, that's I know I know some people use that like that. That is a way to get people into a video call and then add what I'm talking about is getting people into video call. Having their video and audio all come all all.

callers video and audio come into OBS as separate sort of feeds that you can then you know mute or tweak the audio on individually like move their cameras around individually like you can you can fudge this really

awkwardly with browser capture, which is what I have done in the past. You can just get everybody into one video call and then chop it up with browser capture to at least get separate camera feeds. But you're still stuck taking the one audio feed from the call. Yeah, that's bad. Everybody. I mean. Most web-based video call software does a good job of mixing and normalizing people's audio together anyway, so it's not usually a huge deal, but that is a place where vMix absolutely excels over OBS.

So let me tell you something that Zoom added recently, which is a live streaming plugin that lets you export. Well, you can connect it to Twitch or YouTube, but you can also just give it an RTMP.

server feed okay and it pipes up to three feeds out of that i believe interesting uh so then you can get i i haven't gotten it to work yet because i haven't gotten the ffmpeg repeater working right yet but you basically can pipe live three up to three individual feeds out of a zoom call into into your your OBS that sounds appealing other than making people use zoom for a live stream I mean

People are very comfortable with Zoom. I guess so. I guess it's pretty widespread, but you have to install it if you want the good one and not the web based one. Like it requires overhead. If you have a guest on and they don't have it installed, it's a whole thing. I. The number of times I've talked to somebody because we use zoom for full nerd. Um, the number of times we've had somebody that didn't have zoom installed was one. Yeah. Okay. Fair. It was when you were on the show.

What? What are you talking about? I have Zoom installed. You didn't have Zoom installed when we did it one time. I'm looking at it in my start menu. We have a pin. There's a pin. I see. Yeah. You think that's it or should we talk about time servers real quick?

I put the time server in here kind of as a joke, although I'm moving. It's becoming less of a joke. I'm moving closer to it becoming real, but it's probably like years down the line. Look, man, when you said this, I was like, why don't I just have an atomic clock? And then I looked up how to build an atomic clock and it turns out that's a doable project. Wait, really?

Yeah, dude, there's there's board mountable atomic clock elements now. It's not like it used to be that you had to have a crystal oscillator that you heated up to a specific temperature and held at that temperature. And they pulled like. 16 or 20 watts or something but now for space applications they have little tiny ones that are like mountable on a on a on a board they're kind of expensive but like not

For a one-off, it's not undoable. It turns out the challenge is how do you set the time on the atomic clock in the first place? And then you also want to maintain power in events of outages and stuff. So you don't have to go through that hassle because it turns out that setting the time on the atomic clock is kind of.

to an accurate point is kind of challenging. Okay. So see, I don't want to be responsible for local time accuracy. That's, I still want to go to an external authoritative source of truth. I'm just saying, if you're going to do this, just build the atomic clock, man. Sure. Why not? Yeah. The other, the other solution here is to hit GPS because GPS satellites keep exquisitely accurate time. They have to. Yeah. And so.

Probably not going to get too far down this road, but this has come up several times on the discord. And every time people talk about it, I get a little more serious about wanting to do it at some point. I mean, Look, your university had an NTP server. Why shouldn't you? Why should I not have my own NTP? NTP is network time protocol. It's the thing that your devices all use to hit servers on the Internet to synchronize time.

But there is some latency involved in contacting a server halfway across the country and getting a response back.

That's built into the protocol, though. It accounts for it. What if you had a box in your house that everything in your house was talking to to find out what time it was? Time.shoe.maker. That's right. Like, what if you could just have... microseconds of latency on your timekeeping can you set does windows let you put an arbitrary time server in windows does although actually i wonder if you might have to like edit the registry to enable that at this point

Yeah, because there's no there's no pop up for that on my Windows. It just says sync now. And I know in the past you could set your own NTP server in Windows. I thought you still could. And I'm pretty sure Mac OS still lets you do it as well. But yes, this topic, I asked this question in the network channel when people were talking about buying. or building boxes to do this. Eric on the Discord had, I mean, this is some network professional level solution shit.

The solution offered was to intercept all the NTP traffic at the router level and redirect it to your local NTP server, which then means it's almost like it's almost like pile of before time or like every device. Every device that is sending, I think it's port 123 that NTP communicates on. I don't know. I don't remember that. You're basically catching all the traffic on whatever port NTP uses and sending it to your server so that all your...

All your devices are getting diverted to your local NTP server. I don't know how viable that is. It sounds like it works. This is a real hole even for you. Again, that's why this is years away. This is a house project. I don't know why because you could do it in an apartment, I guess. This is the kind of thing I would only do once I had a house and a network rack.

I really think if you're going to go this far, you have to do the atomic clock. That's the only way to make this right. I wonder how susceptible to entropy that is. I wonder how much that can get fouled up if you don't keep it in the right conditions or keep it maintained. Again, I would rather...

I would kind of rather talk to things orbiting the earth because those are pretty far beyond the reach of getting screwed up. They're just, they're just atomic clocks too, man. Yeah, I guess. It's just floating atomic clocks with the radio on it. Yeah, but it's like nice and cold and. Oh, well, sometimes it's really hot.

Yeah, it's either cold or hot. There's no in between. Yeah. Anyway, there are different ways to do this. I won't get too deep into it right now. Like you can you can DIY this with a Raspberry Pi and like a GPS sensor. I think we've talked about that in the past. There's a company called Time Machines that makes what appear to be pretty rugged industrial versions of this. Man, I want a Time Machine. The one everybody likes on the Discord, people are mostly eBaying because new they are $349.

That's pretty expensive. But you can get them for like under 200 on eBay, it seems. Those also just have an antenna that connects to GPS or looks for GPS signal anyway. I'm probably not actually going to do this anytime soon. But look, if I'm if I'm ranking these, if I'm S tiering these, I think the Kindle jailbreak is an S tier. Oh, yeah. the travel t is a solid b travel router is a solid b external capture slash twitch 1440p streaming maybe a b tier maybe an a i don't know

The DIY hummingbird camera, probably a C, maybe an S if I can get it to work and I get hummingbird war videos. We didn't even talk about my foot pedal. I got a foot pedal. I don't.

I use it to capture benchmarks. What kind of foot pedal are we talking? It's one of those Elgato stream deck foot pedals. Okay. Basically. I smash a button and it hits all the keyboard shortcuts that I need to capture video and frame time perfmon charts at the same time. How many how many pedals are on your pedal? There's three, but there's options like I have.

It comes with a bazillion little spring packs that you can use to make the pedals springier or less springy. Okay. Or just turn them off entirely. There's one that just blocks it if you just want to use it as a footrest. Seeing as this is a $90 foot pedal, I guess I'm glad to see it's customizable.

Yeah, I was worried it was going to slide around in my hardwood. It doesn't. It's pretty good. All right. But yeah, I have it bound to push to mute when I'm not using it for benchmarks. Okay. Like mute. Like when I stomp down on it, it mutes as long as my foot is on the pedal. Oh, interesting. It's basically a cough button. That's cool. Yeah. But I'm curious what other people like. I don't. I don't know what else I should use a foot pedal for. Well.

If anybody else has any ideas, let me know. Yeah, that's an F, maybe a D. Wait, what is the foot pedal? The foot pedal. Wow. Man, no foot pedal respect here at all. I mean, it is really nice. specifically when i'm doing those micro stutter videos for pc world it's really nice to just be able to keep my foot on the thing and hit the button when i'm coming up on a fight that looks like it's going to be a good time for micro stutter so i can get a good clean capture and it's hard to do that

without like breaking the action in the game by when you by taking your hand off and hitting the other the other shortcuts um but yeah it's it's a other than that i probably wouldn't have bought a foot pedal sure understandable that you have not ranked the time

server yet i think the time server is a solid f brad i'm sorry if you put an atomic clock in there it moves up to a b on at some point it's going to climb up the ranking okay actually how about this yeah what if i could what if i told you that not only could you get one of those uh

industrial looking time machines boxes to do this yeah but that they also sell a separate and there's a rackable kit for these so you can put both of these in a rack you have a rack not yet that's why this is a post rack project probably some years down the line What if you could also get a red VFD display, you know, VFD like the old school VCR style of. How many points of accuracy can you get? Kind of seven segment numerical display.

Yeah. What if you, what if you could get a local clock that plugged into this, that always was showing you the canonical, how many points, how many decimal seconds can you get? I that I don't remember like six. Can you get six decimal seconds? I don't think it's that big of a display, but just a severe red looking like nuclear facility. Yeah, I don't know, man. These time machines boxes.

And I also, I don't know why they have a CHI highlighted in their logo, but I guess that means something. I, I feel like these type machines boxes looks like the thing you used to buy from the back of popular mechanics that were like, sell like, like. radar speed trap jammers that you put in your dashboard. If you scroll down on that product page, I sent you that clock I mentioned is right there. Oh, perfect. That thing is $190. Good God, man. That's, that's what, you know, look.

I mean, I think it's got to be worth it. You know, like you said, this looks like it. This is sold out of popular mechanics. This is for people who have an actual need for accurate timekeeping on their on their network, which I do not. But it sure would be cool.

Well, I mean, everybody has time has need for accurate time on the network, but it's all served by time dot windows or time dot Apple. Yep. Anyway, I think that's as good a place as any to wrap it up. It's a it's like a project potpourri, I guess. I don't know.

A little, a little more structured than your average patron. Here's what we're working on episode. I'm thinking about the hummingbird camera more. I didn't tell you, I didn't tell about this, but the one thing that I did know, notice that I thought was interesting is a lot of people do.

Um, like how many, like bird nest cameras in, they put it in like bird houses. And the thing that they're doing for those now is they buy those cheap endoscopes. Oh, the, the ones that you use to like check inside your walls and stuff like that.

And you just mount the camera for that at the top of the birdhouse facing down and you get like an incredible view of the thing. Wow. And that is a is a good solution for that problem because those are Wi-Fi connecting and pull the video off from pretty easily. Sure. But the cameras are all kind of crappy. Anyway, if you like this, if you didn't like us, please send us a letter to techpod at content.town.

If you have suggestions or ideas or other feedback, we want this to be kind of a conversation, right? It was a conversation between Brad and me. We want to know what you guys think about this stuff too. Because I think like I'm definitely going to set up for the 1440p stuff. The hummingbird camera is going to continue to be something I look at occasionally to see if the if the cameras are available. I mean, that's a big project.

I might take out an old Pixel phone and see what that looks. Because I have a Pixel 4 here, I think, that I don't use anymore. And that might be a good look for this. If you have thoughts about Brad's travel router or the jailbroken Kindle, please let us know.

And if you think Brad should build an atomic clock, please like, and subscribe. As always, Brad and Will made a tech pod is supported by you, the listener. We wouldn't be here without the audience, without you all every month listening to the show. We would not. And also every week subscribing to the Patreon. We have like like thousands of people in the Patreon that are.

delightful human beings sharing the things that they're into and you can find them all in the tech pod discord which is only accessible if you subscribe to the patreon you got to go to patreon.com slash tech pod for five bucks a month you get access to the discord you get the monthly patron exclusive episodes The Discord is a source of joy and fun and constant learnings for me.

people are always coming up with amazing things they share in there. And, and I'm constantly impressed. I never would have thought about building my own time server. We're not for that. Okay. So sometimes it's a force of evil, but whatever. Um, patreon.com slash tech pod. You too can get time server pill just like Brad. Uh, and I guess, uh, oh, we got to thank our, our patrons, uh, but especially our executive producer to your patrons, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky.

Jordan Lippitt, tech.bunnycrimes.com, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. I'm going to tech.bunnycrimes.com right now.

It sounds like that's been changing. It sounds like they're cycling through. I think it may have been shift F1 at one point. Yeah, it just... we're in the hot seat right now it looks like it's ads for the for their for the things that they're funding so we appreciate you but thanks thanks buddy crimes yeah and everybody else thank you

You are the reason for the podcast season. We would not be here were it not for you. That's true. Very true. I would just be having coffee right now on Friday morning. Maybe I'd go get a donut. I might go get a donut. I think I have a coupon for cheap donuts. I would just be jailbreaking my Kindle and not talking.

people about it yeah just doing weird stuff alone in your room instead of talking to a microphone see that legitimizes all of your hobbies that's right yeah uh but anyway we appreciate you all legitimizing all of our hobbies and we will be back next week with another edition of the tech pod as always please consider the environment for printing this podcast.